The Centre is set to disable the ration entitlements of 15.8 million beneficiaries from October who have not used their ration cards for the past six months, HT was told. The move is the latest step in the government’s effort to clean up the public distribution system (PDS) database and weed out inactive, duplicate and otherwise suspect beneficiaries.
The beneficiaries’ names will not be deleted immediately from the database. Their ration cards will first be temporarily disabled, giving them three months to establish that they are genuine beneficiaries. The amended Targeted Public Distribution System (Control) Order provides for temporary disablement of such cards, followed by field verification and e-KYC within three months before a final decision is taken. The government has argued that such database clean-ups are necessary to ensure that foodgrains reach genuine beneficiaries and to reduce leakages arising from duplicate, deceased, migrated or otherwise ineligible people.
In November 2024, the food ministry said about 58 million ration cards had been removed from the PDS system through these exercises, describing the process as de-duplication aimed at ensuring that only eligible people remained covered. The government is also pushing e-KYC as a central tool for maintaining the ration-card database. e-KYC coverage stood at 90.64% as of July 30, according to the food department.
If they complete the e-KYC process within this period, their cards will be activated again, a senior government official told HT on condition of anonymity. The three-month window is part of the government’s approach to deal with what it calls “silent ration cards” — those against which no foodgrain entitlement has been availed in the past six months. “This process of deleting a person’s name and then asking them to rejoin the system through e-KYC or other such methods is an instance of shifting the burden of accountability from the State to the citizens,” Narayanan said. He said the default approach in a rights-based welfare programme should be inclusion rather than deletion. It said a new protocol for e-KYC-based data replication and mobile-number seeding have also been rolled out.
